leffe186

I really think you’ll be fine with the increased revenue. You won’t be able to spend as much as you have been, but you’ll still be able to strengthen the squad and cut off some dead wood.

The latest Athletic podcast covers this reasonably well: https://theathletic.com/podcast/144-athletic-football-podcast/

Hey lads, it’s not just us two who have injury crises, Liverpool are struggling too: Just to be clear, I believe Alexander-Arnold, Salah, Endo and Szoboszlai have missed a total of zero league games so far. This tweet is so on-brand it hurts.

It serves all the non-cartel or lower division teams and fans by preventing wealthier clubs unsettling and/or taking their best players at any point during the season. It serves fringe squad players and youth development by making clubs give them opportunities when players are injured rather than just going out and buying a player. It’s definitely worth discussing, because you could argue that a lower division club in financial trouble in, say, March can‘t sell players to make ends meet. You could argue that that’s a bad thing too. Just…every window somebody says “I don’t know why we do this” and every window we have to say the same thing.

That’s amazing mate. Will def give you more than that. PM on the way.

It’s not just that. It’s idiot supporters too. The George Carlin quote about “average” intelligence. Every team has them.

Glad we’ve been vaccinated now and are immune .

All circumstantial isn’t it? Our Jan windows this year and two years ago are and were mint. This Jan it looks like most of the big clubs with obvious issues don’t have the FFP room to splurge. Our last two Jan windows have turned out amazing but didn’t seem so at the time. This window seems amazing for us but might turn out to be the opposite. Jan does seem to mainly be loan or loan-to-buy deals and getting rid of deadwood - which often amounts to the same thing. Look at 2022. Juve give us two players they didn’t want, we get rid of players we don’t want (Dele Alli, Ndombele etc). Villa pick up Coutinho. Arsenal get rid of PEA. There’s always one or two big transfers though - 2022 had Bruno Guimaraes and Luis Diaz among others. I still think the end of the window will be busy.

Yours is artificially high because as he says you are in “investment mode”. Your revenue will increase drastically and the ratio will come down. Everton’s hints that they’ve been operating beyond their means for a while, and their chickens have been coming home to roost for some time. PSG are cunts.

Oh don’t worry, I didn’t think you were being disrespectful. Just that when you said we weren’t operating under FFP constraints the opposite was true, we’d been operating under effectively those constraints for far longer. It just meant that we didn’t have to change how we operated when they actually came in, unlike many other clubs. Thus you end up with these wages to turnover figures (first thing on Google):

Massively this. Also the practice of teams buying other teams and using them as farms, although that’s more complex.

You’re “begging the question”. You’re saying that we haven’t ever been constrained by FFP because we haven’t tried to spend more than we take in as revenue. Levy decided around 2004 that we would choose not to spend more than we take in as revenue, partly as financial prudence, maybe partly because he anticipated regulation. We constrained ourselves, and then when FFP came in we operated under its constraints. Contrast that with all the clubs who were run at a loss at the time, and Abramovich who couldn’t give the slightest shit about loss and just spent whatever he could to make Chelsea the best. We’ve always been looking to spend the kind of sums needed to push us close, just within the scope of our revenue - which meant looking long-term (tight wage control, looking to redevelop the stadium, buying young cheap players to develop). Again, if people want the Abramovich style to be the norm then OK, it’s just not what I want.

It’s the Metro On further inspection, it’s based on a “report” - a tweet from a Chelsea guy called Nathan Gissing who might write for Di Marzio but who definitely writes for Chelsea. So it’s par for the course.

Sorry, I think I didn’t understand what you were getting at in the first post. You said that we were “allowed” to spend way more than anyone outside the Top six, and it has been like that for a while. I thought you were asking why? I guess your point was that we’ve effectively been part of the cartel throughout? FFP came in from UEFA in 2009 IIRC. Too late to affect Man City and Chelsea’s sprees and didn’t really affect us directly because Levy had been keeping tight control of our spending anyway since 2004. We didn’t have to suddenly deal with a ceiling imposed by FFP because we’d already been working under that ceiling for years. It’s a very different landscape now, but the ceiling isn’t all that different to the one Levy imposed in 2003-4. Our revenue in 6th was 73% of yours in 5th. In 2022, West Ham’s revenue in 7th was 69% of Arsenal’s in 6th, which was 83% of ours in 5th. The absolute numbers are significantly greater but the relative numbers aren’t all that far off. Your revenue in 2023 will be absolutely light years ahead of 2022. The great tragedy from your POV obviously was that Ashley came along in 2007. Even before Ashley we had overtaken you in the league (we’d finished 9th, 5th and 5th to your 14th, 7th and 13th), and we had overtaken your revenue primarily due to that. Ashley did his thing, and then UEFA brought in FFP a couple of years later. The worst possible timing for you. The reason the ceiling looks so absurd to you now is that you’ve been bought by PIF and in theory have nearly unlimited money at your disposal…and you’ve been mismanaged for years. Most pertinently, for the last five years. That will change. Somebody posted earlier that “We just want to get rid of the dross players we were saddled with due to the Ashley era and build a squad that’s fit to challenge the upper end of the table”. Well I mean, you’ve pretty much done that already, injuries and fixture demands notwithstanding. I think that you’ll make progress every year. Ashley has fucked you, but every year without him is a year with a ton more revenue available to address FFP/F&S/whatever. If you disagree and want to fuck FFP off now then that’s understandable,

It’s massively not perfect, and definitely needs debate and reform. We are allowed to spend more partly because our income has increased. The main reason we can finally start spending serious money is the new stadium. One other reason is that we gradually got better and more consistent and had regular CL for a long time. One underlying reason is that we were famously careful as fuck not to overspend by keeping the wage bill down for years and years relative to the top sides and our revenue. Regular sales helped too.

All of those have been effectively bought by someone at one point or another, tbf. Even location (hello Arsenal) Yeah I totally agree that parity is essentially impossible. (I’m also happy to blame Thatcher partly for this btw). The NFL system could not be implemented here. On Levy - sure he thought it would be better to be part of that cartel. I’m sure every owner does. Even Ashley, although he couldn’t be fucked and/or wasn’t competent enough to actually try. Levy was lucky enough and brilliant enough to do it within the “rules”. They were self-imposed at first and then I’m sure he worked very hard to make sure those rules were imposed on everyone else. That would definitely have been self-preservation.

Absolutely. And yet I nearly walked away. That’s reinforcing my point.

Of course it’s tainted by my club’s position, but by my club’s position over the last 20 years, not just now. As I explained at self-righteous length If you think I’m arguing that we should keep F&S because we’re now really good and fuck everyone outside the cartel, then you’re very wrong. I just…really hated what happened to Chelsea and Man City. That’s really all. I didn’t want it to happen then and I don’t want it to happen now. I don’t know how old you are. I’m 50 and have been going to football since we were in the second division (don’t remember much about that since I was 4). I’ve seen us be shit-good-great-good-mediocre-good. I’d love us to be good forever and win everything, sure. And it’s impossible for me to say definitively how I’d react in your position. But I’m old enough and ugly enough to make a decent guess.

No, I nearly walked away because it felt really wrong to me: that the game had crossed a line with Abramovich and his spending. We had been at a disadvantage relative to the top three or four for years. Did you see us in the 90s? If you were cool with Abramovich then fair enough. I hated it. Yeah, F&S has definitely evolved to be a way of preserving the status quo - the cartel. That’s a problem. We’ve made ourselves part of that problem. I agree with you that we were never in a position to really compete. Why do you think that is?

Don’t get me wrong, I realize lots of Newcastle fans will agree. Some Man City and Chelsea fans agreed, though they have long since disappeared from the scene or assimilated. I just got a bit wound up by the specific rhetoric in that post I think. Edit: Actually I very much do think that some people want carte blanche because I think some have said so elsewhere in this forum. Born of frustration no doubt, but I think it’s there.

Yeah, just used those to illustrate my point that FFP is at least having some impact on the cartel clubs.

Btw I’m genuinely sorry that I’m intruding on this, and I’m sure I’m going to get pelters and fair enough. Just wanted to vent a bit

Really? Differently frustrating, certainly. I thought the Ashley regime was completely disastrous and frustrating because we all knew the potential, and so many years were wasted. Now imagine how frustrating it is to come up against this ceiling 15 years ago after seeing two teams get bought by oil money and having untold millions of it spunked on them, overnight creating a Big 4 and then a Big 5. Then you knuckle down and grind your way through that ceiling inexorably over 15-20 years. Then another team gets bought by oil money and you see their fans saying they’ve had enough of it after one-and-a-half seasons. I get it. It’s annoying that you can’t just throw money at it, like Chelsea and Man City did. It’s annoying Man U and Arsenal right now that they can’t just throw money at their problems too. For argument’s sake, Arsenal would love to give you £100M for Isak. Man U would love to give you £100M for Bruno Guimaraes. They’re not allowed to. I know this isn’t the place for this argument right now - feelings are high, and I’m going to get an unsympathetic response. P&S is obviously flawed, but I don’t think it’s completely without merit. It’s just hard to see you say it “needs to go in the next couple of years or I’m checking out”, and I hope you understand why. I nearly walked away from football when Abramovich came in, not because we couldn’t spend anything we liked on players but because he was a Russian oligarch and he could and did, and it all felt wrong to me. I nearly threw my toys out of the pram because a rival team did that. You’re about to throw your toys out of the pram because you can’t. I hope you can see how that’s a little frustrating to hear.

Can’t remember if there’s a MOTD or media thread but wanted to give some praise. Just watching MOTD2 now with Ian Wright and Fara Williams and their post-match analysis was the best I can remember. Excellent choice of topics, well-illustrated with clips and well-argued, and concise. Maybe I don’t pay much attention to it usually but I was impressed.

It’s so frustrating, and it happens every time. They bring in a new law or approach to address a real problem, have a few weeks enforcing it (by and large) then it just goes away. A combination of a reluctance to punish bigger clubs, many clubs’ persistence and imagination in subverting the change and certain referees simply not enforcing it properly.